Privacy advocates looking forward to an end of the Unites States government’s mass surveillance program due to the looming sunset of PATRIOT Act section 215 may do well to shelve their Champagne bottles. Judge Andrew Napolitano, in a Fox News interview on Wednesday, presented his grim assessment that the US National Security Agency (NSA) snooping would continue even absent the section 215 authority.
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When you sign up to be in the United States military, in many ways the deck is stacked against you. You are required to go where you are told and to do what you are told — including, potentially, to kill people. You can forget the rosy representations the recruiter made before you enlisted. Plus, unlike in other jobs, you cannot quit. Nonetheless, there may still be a way out of being forced to participate in war’s killings — conscientious objection.
Bill Galvin, counseling coordinator at the Center on Conscience and War, provided in an interview last week on the Tom Woods Show an informative introduction to how a military member can seek US government-recognized conscientious objector status. While Galvin cautions that, “except for the very end of the Vietnam period, it’s always been difficult to get out of the military as a conscientious objector” in America, he also says that it can be done.
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On Friday, in his Lew Rockwell Show interview with Ron Paul, host Lew Rockwell interjected effusive praise for Paul’s new show, the Ron Paul Liberty Report. The Ron Paul Liberty Report is a new video program hosted by Paul and Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams that is streamed live each weekday at noon Eastern time.
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From Sky News to CNN, media are asking Michael Scheuer why Osama bin Laden would have a copy of Scheuer’s book Imperial Hubris. The question arose because Scheuer’s book is included in a list of books seized in a 2011 US military raid on bin Laden’s dwelling in Abottabad, Pakistan. The list was released Wednesday by the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In an interview with host J.D. Hayworth on Newsmax TV, Scheuer, who published Imperial Hubris anonymously while working at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), provides a particularly enlightening answer to the media’s persistent question.
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In an in-depth interview at C-SPAN’s Washington, DC studio on May 13, Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) appealed for the Republican Party to change its ways so it can be viewed as the Peace Party instead of as the War Party. Duncan’s comments in the interview expand on the arguments he presented in his April article “A Return to the Peace Party.” In both the interview and the article Duncan suggests that Republicans advocating for peace instead of war would be politically advantageous in addition to being the right thing to do. The Republican Party being seen by most people as the War Party, Duncan argues, is a “recipe for defeat.”
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A “death-qualified” jury in Boston decided on Friday to impose the death penalty on Dzohkhar Tsarnaev in a state where the majority of people oppose the death penalty and where there has been no death penalty for over 30 years.
Back in April, I wrote an article about Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker failing to stand up for his state regarding the potential execution of Tsarnaev. You can read here my article “Gov. Charlie Baker Applauds US Government Circumventing State Law to Execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.”
Isn’t it absurd that a prosecutor and judge will tell a jury to find a defendant guilty even if jury members think what the defendant did — possessing or selling an illegal drug, for example — should be legal? Doesn’t such a restriction on jurors fly in the face of the historical power of jurors to judge both the facts and the law instead of being just another tool for enforcing the many volumes of statutes, regulations, and case law that define criminal offenses in America?
In a new outstanding video presentation, Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger answers these questions and more, presenting the history of American jury nullification dating back to British law as well as the still exercisable power of a juror to decide a defendant is not guilty because the juror disagrees with the criminalization of the defendant’s actions.
Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
The US House of Representatives on Friday again voted to pay for war on the Islamic State (ISIS) without ever having a debate and vote on the authorization of the war. This result is par for the course given the House leadership is well practiced in manipulating House rules to scuttle efforts by Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and James McGovern (D-MA), as well as by other House members, to ensure that the legislative branch fulfills its constitutional responsibility to decide when the US government uses military force.
By barring war debates and votes, the House leadership ensures the continued legislative rubber-stamping of the wars the executive branch unilaterally pursues.
The authorization of funding for the ISIS War that the House approved Friday is included in the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2016 (HR 1735) that covers funding authorization for the Department of Defense generally. This leaves any representative who voted for the legislation with the ability to deny responsibility for the ISIS War by saying he voted for the NDAA just to advance some combination on other provisions in the bill.
Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
United States Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) made news on Wednesday with his astounding comment that he is “shocked” by “how little data” the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting via the US government’s mass surveillance program and with his advocacy that the program “needs to be ramped up hugely.” Considering the vast scope of the spying program, Corker’s plea for yet more snooping appears to be a call for God-like omniscience. Indeed, Corker is all but calling for the US government to seek the kind of all-seeing power Jesus described God as possessing when Jesus told the disciples that God has numbered the individual hairs on a person’s head and knows when a sparrow falls to the ground.
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Speaking Tuesday on the United States House of Representatives floor, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) again urged Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility by debating and voting on if the United States government will continue militarily intervening in Afghanistan for nine more years. Referring to Afghanistan as “well known by historians as the graveyard of empires,” Jones, a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board member, details the high cost in thousands of US troops killed, tens of thousands more US troops wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the US government in the first 14 years of the Afghanistan War. Jones proceeds to note that a new bilateral security agreement President Barack Obama has entered into with Afghanistan “ties us — our nation — to a failed policy for another nine years.”
Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.